I am very excited to announce that your Engine Yard Cloud account can provision new environments in an Australia datacenter. This is in part thanks to our infrastructure provider Amazon, and part due to the quick work by our Engine Yard engineers to add and test the new region.

We already had regions in Singapore, Japan and West Coast USA so why is a region in Australia/New Zealand so exciting? It solves the pesky speed of light problem with respect to latency, in a manner of speaking. Why is latency an issue?

"For every 20ms improvement in latency, we have a linear improvement in page loading times. There are many good reasons for this: an average page is composed of many small resources, which require many connections, and TCP performance of each is closely tied to RTT."
Australia is a long way away from Singapore, Japan and the West Coast of America. It's a minimum 8 hours of flight from Australia to any one of those locations. For a humble Internet packet, the minimum latency is a 200ms. From Ilya's math, that means effective web performance is 10 times slower than a 20ms request.

At Engine Yard we have many Australian customers, and many customers who have Australian customers. Over the last 6 years we've also had many Australian Engine Yard staff, including myself.